In March 2012, smartphone owners began to outnumber owners of other types of mobile phones in the U.S., according to consumer tracking firm Nielsen. But as voters trek to the polls today laden with an unprecedented array of apps and sensors, they’re grappling with legal and social norms rooted in a simpler past.
In 34 states, including the three most populous (California, New York, and Texas), voters are prohibited, or appear to be prohibited, from taking and publishing pictures of their own marked ballot, according to the Citizen Media Law Project. So much for your plans to Instagram your endorsements. In six other states, including infamous ballot battleground Florida, you can’t recording anything whatsoever inside a polling place.
Some voting locations don’t even want you pulling out a phone, much less photographing your ballot with it. In Michigan you’re not allowed to use a cellphone once you’ve entered a polling station; the same reportedly holds true in North Carolina and at certain voting locations in Ohio (where state law allows smartphones in voting booths) and Washington, D.C. Those types of bans make life tough for voters who want to bring notes into the booth via smartphone or to do additional research using cellular internet access.
There are important historic reasons for all of these restrictions. The ban on photographing ballots, for example, is intended to preserve the anonymity of voting and to prevent people from proving how they voted, whether for money, favors, or to avoid harm. The ban on other uses of cellphones, meanwhile, stems from broader fears that voters can be intimidated or manipulated when others “help” them fill out their ballots. “There’s a presumption that operation of a cellphone in a voting booth is unlawful assistance,” a lawyer for the North Carolina board of elections told WRAL TV in Raleigh.
And yet decision-making assistance – from websites, apps, social networks, and archived notes – is precisely why a great many people bought mobile phones in the first place. Assistance in the form of personal notes to self, or of various websites and apps, is much more benign than “assistance” from, say, a party operative or bullying family member barking instructions over your shoulder.
As for vote selling, that’s already illegal, and in the 29 states with mail or no-excuse absentee voting, is trivial to photograph right in the safety of your own living room.
It seems inevitable that voting laws will give way to allow greater use of iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices at the ballot box. As voters’ lives have become more hectic, there’s been a movement to make voting more convenient, whether through absentee ballots, same-day registration, or early voting at polling places opened weeks ahead of election day. In that context, rewriting the law to treat a smartphone like a voter guide or newspaper rather than an illicit vote recorder or voting partner seems like a modest reform.
But in the end, the best deterrent against smartphone overuse at the ballot box probably isn’t a legal one. Voters face ever more complex political questions, after all, and are turning to ever smaller and harder-to-spot communications devices to help answer them. But once they’ve maximized their digital connections – to employers and relatives with different political views, for example – they may not be so keen to telegraph their precise political preferences. Voters tend to be frugal with their time and energy, and there’s nothing so draining of both as a protracted political argument with someone close to you.
Break Your Mobile Habit or Break the Law on Election Day
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Break Your Mobile Habit or Break the Law on Election Day
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Break Your Mobile Habit or Break the Law on Election Day
